British Government Bolsters Anti-Cybercrime Measures

Amidst a bewildering array of new teams and initiatives is a plan to more effectively fight cybercrime in the U.K.

The British state is introducing a new initiative to fight organized online crime: Cyber Crime Reduction Partnership (CCRP). The program will provide a new forum in which U.K. law enforcement, the computer industry and academia can regularly come together to tackle cybercrime more effectively.

"'For too long the public's perception of cybercrime has been a lone bedroom hacker stealing money from a bank account," said Brokenshire, "but the reality is that cybercriminals are organized and global, with a new breed of criminals selling 'off-the-shelf' software to aid gangs in exploiting the public."

Thus the partnership, to be jointly led by Brokenshire and fellow minister David Willetts, who heads the country's Universities and Science department. Their focus will be to help "ensure police and other law enforcement agencies can stay one step ahead of online criminals."

The U.K. government already has a plethora of such programs -- and certainly the CCRP won't be the last. For example, in its first year of operation, London's Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit reportedly prevented an estimated £538 million ($813 million) of "harm" to the public by organized e-criminals.

According to Brokenshire, the CCRP will soon be joined by several additional initiatives: a Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership to better share information between industry and government; a National Computer Emergency Response Team; and a National Cyber Crime Unit within the NCA (National Crime Agency), which will merge that e-Crime Unit with the Serious Organised Crime Agency's Unit Cyber wing.

According to Brokenshire, the intent of this multitude of cybersecurity initiatives is to deepen the country's ability to combat cybercrime. "I am confident we can bring these criminals to justice," he said. "Through greater awareness and action from the public and industry and through continuing to work closely with our international partners, we can deliver a lasting and transformative impact on those criminals that seek to use the economy to harm the U.K. and its interests."

Easily overlooked vulnerabilities could put your data and business at risk. Also in the new, all-digital 10 Web Threats special issue of Dark Reading: How hackers compromised an iOS developers' website to exploit Java plug-in vulnerabilities and attack Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter. (Free with registration.)

Published: 2015-03-03Off-by-one error in the ecryptfs_decode_from_filename function in fs/ecryptfs/crypto.c in the eCryptfs subsystem in the Linux kernel before 3.18.2 allows local users to cause a denial of service (buffer overflow and system crash) or possibly gain privileges via a crafted filename.

Published: 2015-03-03** REJECT ** DO NOT USE THIS CANDIDATE NUMBER. ConsultIDs: none. Reason: This candidate was withdrawn by its CNA. Further investigation showed that it was not a security issue in customer-controlled software. Notes: none.

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